Reward
by The Assassin's Pen
Summary: A season five era one-shot exploring what would happen if Rick thought he had to put Daryl down after everything they've been through together. A look at the difference between walkers and humans, and the fragility and beauty of what life is. Bromance, whump, lots and lots of angst. No slash.


This probably won't be more than a one shot. All it is was an excuse for me to write season fiveish Daryl and Rick in a situation where Rick thinks he has to put Daryl down and struggles enormously with it because Daryl's become so important to him. The idea behind it was that a crazy lady who believes that the walkers are immortal but damned souls captures the both of them. She thinks she could save good people like Daryl and Rick by injecting them with a pure strain and killing them herself-thereby preserving their soul's purity and granting them immortality without corruption. Here she's finished injecting Daryl with nasty stuff and Rick has been watching the whole time-forced by her to be present so that he will understand what she's trying to do. I didn't feel like writing out all that earlier stuff, so I just wrote the emotional, juicy bit. Enjoy.

* * *

The woman looked up, as though pleased with her work, and Rick felt everything inside him seize up and stop.

She smiled sweetly, a calm, serene expression so far past appropriate that it made Rick physically ill. Daryl had stopped struggling. He'd stopped doing anything at all. Pale and still he lay against the wooden table and his fingers hung limp off the edge, the blood no longer dripping down his fingers the way it had consistently the past several nightmarish hours.

Nightmarish. When he'd woken in that hospital and walked through hell to the other side where heaven was a myth, Rick had thought he'd known that nothing could be worse. Then his partner and brother had turned on him and he'd watched his own son shoot down his slathering corpse. The woman he'd loved since they'd met as teenagers left him alone with a baby he couldn't support and couldn't protect, and then when the man who'd stepped in to fill all the cracks the previous losses had split in his soul Rick lost him too.

He choked on his own crushing disbelief, sagging in his restraints as the woman tenderly lifted Daryl's dominant hand and curled his fingers lovingly around his crossbow's stock, his cooling fingers settled near the trigger. She hummed as she worked, oblivious or uncaring to Rick's state, lifting a damp cloth from a bowl and wringing it out with practiced, easy movements. She took her time wiping the blood and sweat from Daryl's still chest, his throat. She unclipped the restraints from his bloodied wrists and wiped away the gore, stroking her fingers down the tendons of his left hand as though admiring the finely strung cords of an instrument.

"He has beautiful hands," she said softly, laying his limb down with a misplaced reverence.

"Had," Rick said hoarsely, his anger clashing and consuming his grief. "There's nothing beautiful about what he is right now—about what he will become. Let me free, let me prevent that. This thing, this damnation of the world isn't what you think. It doesn't matter how good Daryl's heart was, you killed him and he will turn just like the others. He'll become something that is the perversion of everything you used to admire."

She tutted, but didn't raise her voice or seem angered by his outburst. She reached for Daryl's arrows, cleaning the flecked blood and skull fragments off each dulling feather with the patience of a jeweler. Carefully, she lifted his left hand and curled his fingers around the three bolts, resting his fist and the long used shafts against his breast. "You'll see, Mr. Grimes. Have faith. Your friend will be rewarded for his pure actions. He will rise again, and he will have nothing to fear."

"He was my brother!" Rick exclaimed, straining against his ties and no longer caring that he had dropped the act that had almost freed him. "He was my brother, my blood, and you took the only reward we ever get in this existence. You stole his _life_!" he seethed, hissing the words through his clenched teeth, barely aware of the blood and saliva coating his lips. "You just destroyed the only beautiful thing left in this damned world."

The woman turned cold, disapproving eyes on him. "Your lack of faith will be your downfall. I want you to join your brother in eternity, do not throw away your chance," she warned. She stared Rick down for several long moments before her expression softened and she gazed down at Daryl's peaceful face. Rick dreaded the moment he would no longer have even that dignified stillness. The woman lifted a hand and stroked Daryl's hair to the side, rubbing her thumb against his cheekbone. There was a sigh in her words, and Rick had to swallow back bile. "He's so beautiful. Imagine the creature he will be when he rises again." She turned her unsettlingly light eyes back on Rick and he swallowed hard, staring right back. "You need to understand."

Rick shuddered back involuntarily when she took strides towards him, but there was nowhere for him to go. When she drew a knife he pressed himself even further back, his heart pounding furiously in muffled retaliation. He grit his teeth and threw his head back, slamming his skull and shoulders into the back of the chair, all of his fight having nowhere to go.

"Shhhh," she hushed him, bracing the blade against his ropes and ripping down in one swift stroke. The bloodied rope frayed and Rick was able to break his wrist free. He didn't know what kind of delusion the woman was under of him cooperating, but Rick was not about to play into it. His fingers shot straight up to her throat and closed on it, and when the woman tried to cry for her accomplice he crushed harder, watching the terror light in her eyes as she remembered what had happened. She was alone. Every muscle Rick had free tensed. In one vicious burst of power he hurled her against the wall one-handed and did no more than blink as the blood splattered the side of his face. Her skull had been nothing against the cement wall and his fury. He torqued his shoulder painfully as he strained for the knife, bloodied fingers snatching it up with a rusty scrape. He made short work of his ropes and sprang to his feet, rushing to the table.

The sudden return of blood flow to his legs and burst in his brain slowed him with a tingling head-rush and he stumbled, clapping the knife against the table where Daryl lay with a sharp sound. He leaned against the table, panting back his vision, swallowing down blood and saliva and the gulping breaths that were no longer enough and would never be enough. He felt his shoulders tremble with his weakened weight after no food for two days and he stared down, clenching on the knife handle in an attempt to force himself into looking at Daryl's face. He'd been so desperate to stop his turning, but faced with his body everything inside him turned to sickly stone and he wanted to shut down.

He stared down at the congealing blood he'd scraped his fingers through. Daryl's blood. Blood that was cold and had stopped flowing in those solid, precious moments that defined them from the walkers. There was such a thin veil preserving their humanity—only a heartbeat. They shared so much else with the walkers—drive, shape, hunger. Their saving grace was the warming power of a beating heart. Rick gasped out a sob and covered his mouth, smearing his beard with Daryl's blood as he squeezed his eyes shut. His ribcage contracted painfully and he gasped in a breath, forcing himself to turn eyes on Daryl's slack face. He wouldn't let Daryl's peace be disturbed. It was their pact, their creed, their promise more sacred than anything that existed anymore.

 _Just don't let me become one of those things_.

It was in the panicked eyes of every person who knew they were done for. Amy. Dale. Herchel. Andrea. Tyrese. Countless others. He didn't have to be present at their final moments to know what had been in their eyes. It had been in his own when he'd looked into the Governor's challenge and seen no way out.

 _Just don't let me turn_.

His fingers clenched on the knife handle and he hated himself for the bitter moments he'd already lost. How long had it been? Five minutes? Twenty five? He had lost all concept of time. Time Daryl didn't have.

Feeling sick, his vision blurred with tears he blinked harshly away, Rick reached for Daryl's jaw and gripped gently, turning his head with the tenderness of one dealing with a newborn. He lifted the glinting knife already encrusted with the sins of their captor, praying he had the strength. His trembling fingers felt through Daryl's hair and along the yet warm curve of his skull, feeling for the dip in the back where his spine connected. When he found it he settled the tip of the knife against the groove, bracing everything inside him to drive the blade home. He sucked a trembling breath, settling his free hand over Daryl's face, gripping his cheekbones firmly, bracing his skull so there was no chance of the knife slipping. Clean. The stab had to be clean. He owed Daryl that.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, red-rimmed eyes settling on Daryl's face. His eyes were closed, and Rick's hand was covering his mouth as though trying to silence him. Rick swallowed back a sob and tried to steady himself. He'd put plenty of people down. Killed living people staring straight at him without missing a beat—all to protect people like the one he was about to finish. His chest shuddered and stuck on the oxygen he tried to draw and he tried to ignore the warmth still lingering in Daryl's flesh.

"Daryl," he whispered, faltering for a moment, dropping his head down so his forehead was braced against Daryl's temple, knowing that he had maybe seconds left. He'd let too much time trickle away already. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry brother," he whispered frantically, and with his nose still pressed to Daryl's cheekbone he tensed for the plunge.

That's when he felt a breath, weak and warm press against his palm. The sickness of failing his family split into his gut like a knife and he sobbed, lifting his head to stare blearily at the fingers that wouldn't keep a solid grip on Daryl's slack jaw. Walkers made sounds. They no longer needed to breathe, but some ghostly, remembered cycle of useless breath must continue to stir their dusty throats or they would be silent. He was too late. He was too late and he knew it. Daryl hadn't even cooled yet and his body was being pulled into the clutch of the virus he'd been carrying like a time bomb. Daryl's fingers twitched and his hand jerked hard enough to disturb his beloved weapon as the disease tested its grip on his tendons, yanking at his strings with the unrefined harshness of the undead. The grace bred into the hunter's every fiber over years and years of living had been consumed in a few seconds of Rick's weakness.

His grip faltered as another scraping breath pressed against his palm, escaped through the trembling gaps between his fingers. Daryl's hand twitched again, this time dislodging the arrows laying against his chest, and Rick couldn't take it anymore. He felt the tip of his knife sink into the soft flesh at the base of Daryl's skull and that's when his eyelids fluttered weakly, blearily open.

Rick froze, staring, expecting to see the sickly yellow and jaundiced orange of a walker's hungry stare. Instead, the pain-dulled glimmer of Daryl's natural blue gaze was struggling to focus on him, and when the next breath left Daryl's body the hint of a sound escaped with it.

"Rick?"

Rick yanked the knife away and dropped it, horrified and overjoyed in equal measure. The emotions made him mute and he reacted viscerally, cradling Daryl's head with one hand and gripping his shoulder hard with the other. Rick's body gave in and he bent over, his head resting on Daryl's chest, dislodging the bolts as he clung to his brother and cried. His ragged sobs were too heavy for him to be able to hear Daryl's heart, but he could feel its weary thumping against his cheek and he drank in the feeling like it was the only beautiful thing in a world of blackness. In that moment, it very nearly was.

He was so weak with relief that he couldn't draw himself up for a long time, so he just lay there and soaked in his brother's warmth. When the shock began to ebb Rick realized with horror that he was probably making Daryl's weak breathing difficult, but when he tried to raise his head Daryl's broad hand settled against his head and he released a long breath. It sounded so much like a death rattle that Rick felt himself start to panic anew, but Daryl's hand had the insistence of muscle and intent behind it and beneath Rick's cheek Daryl's heart beat faithfully on.


End file.
